Buzzwords
by tider58
Summary: Family. Love. Hate. Death. Who needs a dictionary when every word means something different to every person? These are snippets of Callie's most important words. If you don't know Callie, please visit my stories "Simple Kind of Life" and "The Ones You Come Home to."
1. Chapter 1

_Dad._

She stops trying to hug him when she's five. She's pretty sure he loves her, it's just that he doesn't like to show it, or he doesn't know how. Maybe it doesn't matter which one is the reason. She knows physical affection makes him uncomfortable, so she just doesn't do it anymore. But that's okay. By then she's already realized that a father isn't necessarily a daddy—and that she has two other people to hug anytime she feels like it.

 _Dean._

Brother. Protector. Father. Friend. Dryer of tears. Green eyes and quick wit, teaser and scolder and hair-rumpler and forehead kisser. Home.

 _Sam._

Brother. Comforter. Teacher. Strong arms and bear hugs, helper and confidante and sense-maker and empathizer. Home.

 _Friends._

They move around too much for her to make friends that stick. It can be lonely sometimes, but mostly it's just life. It's all she knows and all she expects ever to know. Besides, she has her brothers, and they play with her as much as they can. Sometimes they take her to the park and let her do kid things while they watch from not too far away and talk family business or scope out what Dean calls "MILF"s and refuses to define for her. Once she meets a girl her age on the swings who asks her where she lives. When she says a motel, the other girl laughs. Callie doesn't like to be laughed at. She hops down from the swing and kicks the girl in the shin. The girl's mother swoops in like an angry hen and starts scolding Callie. They're there in a heartbeat, Dean scooping Callie up in one arm while Sam apologizes to the mother. "I don't know where your parents are, but that little girl needs to learn appropriate behavior," the woman directs at Dean, whom she seems to have pegged as the one in charge. Sam makes Callie tell the girl she's sorry, and then Dean hands Callie off to him and orders them to the car. He hangs back and Callie never find out what he says to the lady that makes her eyes widen and her lips press together so hard it looks like she's sucking on a lemon. Dean doesn't like it when people mess with his siblings, even when they're the ones who started it.

 _Car._

The backseat is her favorite bed, Sam's knee her best pillow, classic rock and gritty voices her ever-present lullaby. She wouldn't have it any other way.

 _Death._

She doesn't remember her mother, but she knows the story well enough. And she knows Sam and Dean have a different mother, and that something horrible happened to her when they were little. When they drop her off at various places while they go on hunts, she lies awake at night and thinks of what it would be like to lose one of them. Because it's dark and because she is alone, she lets herself cry.

 _Nightmares._

She knows that monsters are real, vampires and ghosts and ghouls and werewolves and skinwalkers and things she doesn't even know how to pronounce. She knows this, but it's not monsters that haunt her dreams. And when she wakes from one with tears on her cheeks and horror in her soul and crawls into bed with one of her brothers, curls up with a fist full of his shirt and breathes in his scent to reassure herself that he's real, it doesn't take long before she's lulled back to sleep by light snoring, falling easily into better dreams where everyone is safe and happy and alive.

 _Temper._

She has Dean's temper. Flash and flare, brash and blazing. But once unleashed, it's quick to abate. Sam, though. He burns slow, simmering, so when he finally lets go for real, even their father doesn't see it coming.

 _Goodbye._

Sam leaves and Callie tries to follow. Not because she loves him more than the others, but because they aren't going anywhere.

 _Hole._

His absence punches straight through the fabric of their family, leaving ragged edges and limp threads. Dean rarely teases anymore, and his smiles don't touch his eyes. Dad speaks less and even more gruffly. The backseat is too big.

 _Hate._

"I hate him," she says, and Dean just smiles sadly and nods his understanding, hoping it makes her feel better to give this pain a different name.

 _Invisible._

They don't notice her enough. She wonders if she's becoming invisible. So she steals Dean's gun and sneaks out to shoot bottles off the fence. She thinks she's getting pretty good at it, too, until he descends on her like an angry bear, fierce and thunderous and punishing. She's not invisible, after all, she thinks after, when she's lying facedown on her bed and crying into the pillow. She makes a note to remember that.

 _Work to do._

She refuses to look at him when he climbs in next to Dean, and when he reaches for her hand she retreats to the far corner of the backseat. But when he's not looking, her eyes are glued to him, tracing his profile, the shaggy hair sticking out slightly behind his ears. She wonders how it's possible to love someone so much and want to kill them at the same time. She falls asleep to the sound of their voices, and with a small smile on her face.

 **END.**

* * *

 **So I know this one wasn't exactly what I promised at the end of SKL, but I enjoy these little writing exercises and find that they keep the wheels turning. I thought those of you who enjoyed that story might like this, too. I do have another one in the works (a "plottier" one than this). That being said, I'd love to know what you thought of this. Thanks, as ever!**


	2. Chapter 2

_**Cold**_

She gives him the cold shoulder as long as she can, but he's all puppy-dog eyes and chocolate shakes and patience. The opposite of Dean, in some ways, who snaps at her to stow her crap and get her head in the game already, even though she thinks he could give her a freaking _day_ or two to get over two whole years of carefully cultivated hate. Sam gets it, though. Sam always did get it. So he buys her shakes and he smiles at her with his eyes and he listens, really _listens_ , when she talks, and she knows she's on the verge of loving him again, even though he left, even though he maybe doesn't deserve it, even though it's a lie anyway because she never stopped and she knows it.

 _ **Kill**_

She doesn't see her first kill coming because she was supposed to stay in the car. But when they don't come back and don't come back, she can't just sit there any longer, so she snags the first weapon her fingers brush against inside the trunk and heads into the warehouse her brothers disappeared into. Being grabbed from behind isn't even the worst part, nor is being dragged down a dark dank hallway and tossed like a bag of trash into the center of the room where they're both tied up and awaiting their own bloody fate. No, the worst part is when her eyes meet Dean's and she sees how pissed off he is. She knows if they die right now, he will spend all of eternity making her afterlife a living hell, even if they somehow end up in Heaven. She can hear it now— _What part of "stay in the car" did you not understand?_ —and with the possibility of that spinning out for all eternity playing in her head, she grips the blade that's stuffed in the back of her jeans and slashes backward and catches the monster in the throat. It's a lucky kill. But when she frees her brothers and reluctantly removes the gag from Dean's mouth, she begins to reassess the meaning of that word, "lucky."

 _ **Forgiveness**_

She'd thought it was going to be awkward, some chick-flick moment that they'd both have to struggle their way through and then spend the rest of their lives trying to pretend didn't happen, but it's not that way at all. It's simple, uncluttered with baggage. It's a hand on her shoulder and hazel eyes meeting green, and words wouldn't even help so she skips them. So does he. When she leans her head lightly against his bicep and feels the breath he'd been holding leaving his lungs, she knows that this is as complicated as it ever had to be.

 _ **Loss**_

It's too much—losing Dean and then getting him back only to lose Dad—it's just. too. much. All Callie can remember when she thinks back on the day, for the rest of her life, is a coffee cup hitting freshly waxed industrial-issue hospital tile. A hollow shout as Sam hits his knees and gathers that invincible man into his arms. Her own knees give way and she lands in the small puddle of spilled coffee and she watches, hears the shouts, sees the frantic activity, but takes in nothing but the scent of coffee and the cold of the tile seeping through her jeans as their world rips apart at the seams.

 _ **Later**_

Later she will decide that it's pretty clear she is evil. How else could anyone explain her relief over Dean being okay even though it means their father is dead?

 _ **Deals**_

"I'd do it," she says one night when Dean is tucking her into a motel bed. "I'd die if it meant you and Sammy got to live." He doesn't take that very well at all.

 _ **Fight**_

Growing up with two brothers, she's sort of accustomed to the fighting that comes with the territory. This seems different somehow, like the words they're saying aren't really the words they _want_ to say, like there's a stockpile of other words that need to be said but that neither one of them is willing to touch. Dean punches Sam once, and that's bad, and Callie cries out in fear because it's not what they do and it scares her. They both tear their gaze away from each other to look at her, and Dean's green eyes are blazing and cold at the same time, and she thinks what she sees there is not directed at her, exactly, but it still makes her blood run cold. Sam just reaches over and catches her arm, pulling her into a side-armed hug next to him, both of them facing their older brother, and it seems to Callie that he's using her in a way as a weapon against Dean but she doesn't resist. Dean has a lot of anger in him, and right or wrong, one of these days he's going to get around to fighting the person he's really angry at.

 _ **Road**_

Once they get back out there it's not the same, but is anything ever the same after everything changes?

 _ **Certainty**_

There is only one thing she knows for sure, counts on with all she has, would put her life on the line to defend. Come anger and betrayal and harsh words and back-turning and proclamations of goodbye, they are a team, the Winchesters, and they are unstoppable. This she holds fast to, takes to bed with her, awakens with and clutches at when things seem dicey. And when the unseen beasts tear the life out of her brother, this is what makes her utterly certain that the very world must be coming to an end.

* * *

 **I thought I was done with this one, but there were a few more words I felt like exploring. Hope you don't mind. Thank you for reading. Reviews are love (and make me write more).**


	3. Chapter 3

**Heavy**

His absence is somehow heavier than his presence ever was, more solid and cumbersome. It takes up a lot of space. It's in the neatness of the motel bathroom counters and the unfamiliar music in the car, turned low because everything is too loud these days, even silence. It's in the way they don't look at each other sometimes, when they both sense his name on the other's tongue and hope like hell it doesn't find its way out into the open—and hope like hell that it does.

 **If**

She's losing Sam too, now, _again_ , and she wants to hate him for it but she can't quite bring herself to blame him. If she was stronger, older, braver, smarter … if she was a good sister, she'd be looking for ways to bring him back, too.

 **Hell**

She wakes some nights to the sound of her own screams, green eyes filled with unspeakable horror and depthless agony following her right into consciousness, and Sam's arms find her in the dark and pull her close. He rocks her and shushes her and comforts her and tells her it was just a nightmare, just a dream—and she pretends to believe that, even though they both know better.

 **Demons**

They've always been the bad guys, so how is Callie supposed to react when she walks in on Sam and Ruby in bed? He yells at her to get out, as if she needs a directive because she sure as hell doesn't want to see anymore of _that_ , and the remote control cracks against the wall next to her head even as she turns to flee. Later, she wonders if it was just the dim light in the room that made it look like there was blood on his lips. Yes, she decides. That's all it was.

 **Spiral**

They never used to fight, she had _him_ for that, but now they snipe at each other almost constantly. Sometimes it's okay with her because it's the only time he really seems to remember she's around. The night he drags her home from a bar, after beating the shit out of the creep who'd fed her liquor until she couldn't see straight and then tried to take her home with him, she knows she's crossed the line and that Sam's anger is warranted because it was a stupid thing to do. But the old Sam would know she was just seeking something he wasn't providing, and he wouldn't be so harsh. That wasn't his way. She guesses that this is his _new_ way, though, and it does nothing to make her feel better about the trajectory he is on.

 **Resurrection**

It takes several days before she will let Dean out of her sight. She's afraid she'll wake up and realize it's a dream—though a good one this time, from which the awakening would be the nightmare. The first night back he lies next to her as she drifts off to sleep clutching his shirt in a death grip that makes her fingers ache and thanks whatever God may be listening for bringing her brother back to them. She doesn't speak of Sam's troubles. She has a feeling he'll find out for himself soon enough. When dawn light seeps between the crack in the curtains, Callie wakes up and realizes he never moved through the night. He'd been no more willing to let go than she was.

 **Detox**

She refuses to leave the basement until the shouts behind the panic room door fade enough that she falls asleep from sheer mental and emotional exhaustion. Then Dean scoops her up like she weighs nothing and carries her up the stairs. She awakes as he covers her with blankets. "Dean, what are you doing? I need to—" But he just shakes his head, cutting her off. "You need to sleep, is what you need to do." She doesn't argue because her eyelids feel like lead weights, but she hears his last words before she allows them to slip closed and deposit her back into unconsciousness. "You rest, Callie. I've got him. We're going to get our Sammy back, I promise."

 **Stranger**

They do, sort of, but it takes a long time. And he's never _really_ the same.

 **Secrets**

Her brothers think they're so good at playing it off, keeping the others out and putting on a brave face that belies what's really going on behind their strained banter and forced smiles. Like she doesn't know that Sam sometimes considers running his tongue over the knife after a kill. Like she doesn't know that Dean still lives at least part of his waking hours in Hell, unable to move on, afraid he never will.

* * *

 **These are so much fun to write, I hope you'll indulge me. I promise to get a chapter of "The Ones You Come Home to" up this week.**


	4. Chapter 4

**More words! (These take us from Lucifer Rising through Swan Song)**

* * *

 _ **Freeze**_

There's this moment when the earth splits and you know there's nothing you can do to stop it, there's nothing _they_ can do to stop it, and they clutch desperately at each other in wide-eyed horror as the beast bursts forth in spirals of fire and retribution, and you've all done this, bought this, paid in full in mistakes and regret and it's over and just beginning at the same time and you _can. not. move._

 _ **Destiny**_

Callie doesn't know why it is that the things that are fated to happen are so ugly and so unthinkable. She doesn't know why her brothers were chosen or why she wasn't or why God or the angels or whoever is directing this cruel play saw fit to stage this epic showdown using the two people she loves most in the world in the starring roles. Everything is bad now and heavy with waiting to see who will say yes, when. She would jump in the hole herself if she could, but it's not her destiny. She's an observer, helpless, silently screaming, grieving prematurely as they hold their collective breath against what's to come.

 _ **Repetition**_

She heard once in some movie that hell is repetition, but she thinks the opposite is true. It's comforting, knowing what to expect when, and that no matter how many times it happens you can count on it coming back around again. Predictability is underrated. People who live normal lives and eat dinner around a table and go to school every day, those are the lucky ones. Her, she picks petty arguments with her brothers and they respond in kind, as expected, and it's not ideal, it's not Taco Tuesday or Family Game Night but that's never been the Winchester brand of normal and she gives thanks every single time one of them gets sick of her attitude and tells her so, or orders her to bed even though it's early because she's being a brat and they can't take it anymore, or any of the other million little responses they have to her counterintuitive pleas for reassurance. As long as they are repeating these things they are _alive_ , they are _themselves_ , and that's really all she gives a damn about.

 _ **Drink**_

Whiskey works for Dean, and she thinks that if Sam had his way he'd be chugging something far more dangerous. But they don't keep Sam's drink of choice around, and she's not quite that desperate anyway (yet), so she sneaks Dean's flask from his jacket pocket while he's allowing himself a brief and fitful rest and she slips out the door and sits on Bobby's back porch and drinks. It makes her cough and gag and then it's just warm, numbing, and she can't say she likes it exactly but she definitely sees the appeal it holds for her brother. Numbness comes in handy when you're in charge and you're hurting and you're losing, you're _destined_ to lose, and you hate yourself more by the day because you wear all of the suffering and all of the loss and all of the pain on your shoulders no matter how many times people tell you it's not your fault. Callie sees the guilt and self-loathing all over his face, in his haunted eyes and his five-o'clock shadow and the defeated slump of his shoulders. Yeah, she understands why he drinks. And maybe at this point it's all he's got, so she caps the flask and slips it back into his jacket. He stirs restlessly and she leans over and kisses his cheek, unaware of how many thousands of times he has done the same while she was the one sleeping. Or maybe on some level she is aware, because when she straightens up and looks at him in the darkness, she has to choke back a sob.

 _ **Fair**_

The Winchester siblings don't contemplate fairness very often, because the concept exists outside their experience of life and the world. Callie said it once, petulantly and even with an accompanying stamped foot, when she was feeling her teens—"That's not fair!"—and was met with such a searingly contemptuous look from Dean that she vowed never to say it again. What's fair, when you start out behind the eight ball and it goes downhill from there? When your family members die on the regular and another apocalypse is ready to kick off? Fair would be nice, but it's fantasy. They live somewhere else.

 _ **Power**_

She's always seen them as powerful, superhuman, invincible—even with evidence to the contrary right before her eyes: Sam stabbed in the back, collapsing into their brother's arms in a rainy nightmarescape of mud and blood and tears. Dean shredded by hellhounds, all signs of life extinguished from his open eyes. Death held no sway over them, not for long, anyway. They were heroes. As they stood in that field of reckoning, Callie wondered just a little at the power that had propelled them through this life so far, whether they had used it all up and were just here as regular people, pushed on by forces bigger even than Dean and Sam, helpless to stop or reverse or even stand up under what was to come.

 _ **End**_

She sees the moment when Sam regains himself, when his eyes become his own again. His fist uncurls, he wants to let his knees buckle and spill him to the ground next to the beaten and disfigured form of their brother, to help him and embrace him and beg his forgiveness but he can't because this is not the end. He has to hold on, he has to keep control, if only for a few more minutes before the job is done. Even now, even this close to the end, he's got work to do.


	5. Chapter 5

**More words! This takes us the shortcut route along Season 6 (Soulless Sam). Please let me know what you think! And feel free to contribute words.**

* * *

 _ **Ordinary**_

This is how they live now, he insists, weapons tucked away along with their brother's name and their old life, a guest room for Callie in a house that offends her in every sense. Lisa's kid asks about Sam one day, starts prying about their past, and when he won't stop Callie punches him in the nose. It's not a lot of blood but Dean's pissed, and he yells at her and orders her up to the room that will never be hers while he coddles the kid, holding a dishcloth to his nose like the useless baby he is. Callie glares, seethes, but goes. When Dean comes in, very late, and sits next to her on the bed, she turns completely away from him and he gets the message.

 _ **Paranoia**_

Dean may say they're done with the life, but he still sleeps with a gun close at hand and carries a flask of holy water everywhere he goes. Callie's pretty sure normal people don't do that.

 _ **Practice**_

The fact that this is the second time she's had to learn to live without a brother doesn't make it any easier. It's not like riding a bike or playing guitar. Grief isn't something you can master, and even though they don't talk about him because it makes Dean drink even more than he does already (and that's a lot), he's as much there as he ever was, his presence large and his absence gnawing. She misses deeper than she even expected, thinking she would have come to terms with a Samless existence when he left them. But this is different. This is forever.

 _ **Temporary**_

So when it turns out that it's not forever the world turns upside down. Again.

 _ **Return**_

It should be the _best_ moment. It should be elation, bliss, uncharted, untethered, limitless joy. And it is, at first. Seeing his face, freshly shaven cheeks ruddy with youth and health and LIFE, feeling his arms around her again, strong and whole and solid—those are wonderful things. Only later, when she's alone and watching the shadows play on the ceiling above her bed, does she wonder at the hollowness in his eyes, remember his two beats of hesitation before he returned her embrace. She wonders how many times the Winchesters can beat death without consequence, and whether the answer to that question is even now walking around in her brother's body.

 _ **Denial**_

When Callie presses, Dean refuses to agree that anything is wrong with their brother. But he never leaves Callie alone with Sam, _ever_ —and that's all the confirmation she needs.

 _ **Soul**_

It's everything, she realizes. It's who you are and what you've been and all that you love or have loved or can ever love in your whole life. And when it's not there, everything that makes you _you_ is just … gone. She tells herself she loves this shell that looks like Sam, but she knows what she really longs for is locked in a cage in Hell, and no amount of pretending can make that okay.

 _ **Risk**_

They make the only choice they can live with even though it could destroy them all.

 _ **Whole**_

The shell fills and his eyes aren't hollow anymore and Callie thinks she could quit this life now, grab hold of both brothers' hands and shove them all into a life of cookie-cutter houses, school days and boring jobs and balanced meals around an actual dining table. Then she remembers. Normal isn't safety, it's ignorance. Just because you don't know what's lurking in the shadows doesn't mean it's not waiting to rip you in half.


	6. Chapter 6

**Hi, friends of words! This batch will take us through Season 7, and you know what that means: Sam's hallucinations, temporary brother breakup, Bobby's death, Sam's collapse, and the introduction of Kevin.**

* * *

 _ **Illusion**_

Sam thinks he's good at covering. That his brother and sister don't notice how jumpy he is, or suspect that his edginess is more than just adjusting to being back on solid ground, mixed with a little sleep deprivation. One morning Callie brings him coffee and accidentally spills some in his lap and he jumps up and shouts at her, cursing furiously. Her "I'm sorry" is uncharacteristically meek, and he looks at her and sees her wide eyes, hands hovering near her mouth, fear directed toward _him_ , for God's sake, and he doesn't know whether to pull her into a hug or to grab the nearest sharp object, turn and plunge it into the heart of the taunting, ever-present figure of Lucifer just behind his left shoulder—so he does neither. He turns and storms out, leaving his little sister and his hallucination to play their relentless game of tug-of-Sam. Right now he's too exhausted to care much who wins.

 _ **Blood**_

Callie is afraid they're losing him again. He's talking to someone they can't see, zoning out more than he's tuned in, and he has always, _always_ been turned in before. She is so scared. And then one day she wakes up and she's more angry than scared because Lucifer can't _have_ him, not _him_ , not their Sammy. So when Dean tells her to sit tight while he goes into the warehouse to "pound reality into Sasquatch," she waits a minute and then follows, sticking to the shadows by the door and biting back a squeal of alarm when Sam shoots— _Whoa, whoa! Sam! This discussion does not require a weapons discharge!—_ and then she just stands there and prays to the God everyone says has jumped ship, to the angels who maybe haven't and maybe aren't all dicks like Dean thinks, that they will wrestle Sam away from Lucifer, away from what's tearing him apart, envelop him back into the Winchester fold where he may not be safe but will _always_ be loved, which sometimes feels like the same thing.

 _Believe_ ME _, okay? You gotta believe me. You gotta make it_ stone _number_ one _and_ build _on it. You understand?_

She can't see what Sam sees, but she can see his eyes, the desperate desire to let Dean pull him out, save him, reclaim him. And when he does, eventually, walk out of that warehouse with Dean supporting him on one side and Callie on the other, it feels like they've maybe won the battle, if not the war.

 _ **Estranged**_

It has been a while since her brothers went their separate ways, and Callie hates it because she isn't given a choice (even though she doesn't want one) and because she's not completely sure what happened between them, but Sam is _so_ angry and Dean is _so_ stubborn that she's worried this time they might stay apart. Sam gives her a hug and promises to call her later and leaves, and she's so pissed about the whole thing that she picks a fight with Dean, which is never ever a good idea because he always wins and this time's no different.

 _What if he's not strong enough to be on his own, Dean? It hasn't been that long since he had fucking_ SATAN _in his head, or have you forgotten? Why are you letting him go?_

He towers over her, a threatening finger in her face, and she refuses to back away even though her self-preservation instincts tell her to.

 _Do_ not _presume to lecture me about things you don't understand, do_ not _use that language, and don't you_ ever _speak to me like that again unless you want real trouble. We clear?_

She's rarely felt brave enough to push her luck when he growls like that, so instead she just glares at him and runs off to the bathroom and slams the door and thinks bad words at her oldest brother and hopes, hopes, hopes that Sam will be okay, that he will be back soon, that they will fix this. Because they're stronger together, and there's some scary stuff going down.

 **Shatter**

Bobby is lying in a hospital bed with a hole in his head, and Dean's denial clashes spectacularly with Sam's pragmatism and tendency toward preemptive grief. When he goes, their surrogate-uncle-father-teacher-friend, it hits like a stone thrown at the windshield of a moving car. One solid smash, then the spiderwebs bursting out from the center, weakening the structure and promising eventual disintegration of the whole damn thing. Callie cries in Sam's arms because Dean's grief is a dangerous animal.

 _ **Break**_

Lucifer is winning despite all their efforts to hold Sam here. His eyes are haunted and tormented, he can't sleep and the torture overwhelms everything. Callie is old enough by now to understand that her brothers aren't _actually_ superhuman, they have weaknesses, flesh and blood mortality. But she's seen both of them come back from nothing, from the very end, from absolute finality. So how can she perceive Sam's ultimate, insurmountable enemy as anything more than a problem to be solved? He won't go out like this.

 _ **Prophet**_

His name is Kevin and he's in advanced placement. He's not much older than she is, but he's far more scared. He doesn't know this world, and then God or whoever yanked him into it and shoved the most powerful thing in existence into his arms and tossed him out to fix the world. Callie feels sorry for him, and angry at this way the universe has of screwing with people's lives. He didn't ask for this. She wishes she could tell him it will get better, but that would be a lie, and he's probably better off knowing the Winchester truth—it only gets worse.

 _ **Win**_

Dick is dead. It should go in the win column. But Dean is missing, and that is a definite loss. Callie won't entertain the idea that he's really gone, and Sam's efforts to find him are half-assed in her eyes. They fight like they did last time they lost their big brother, only now Sam isn't seeking power in demon blood, comfort in demon sex, or burying himself in an obsessive mission in the search for their brother. This time the mission will fall to Callie, because she'll be damned if she's going to sit by and let things lie as Sam adopts a freaking dog and flirts with a girl and works at a bar like he's a _normal guy_. She tells him she'll find Dean if he won't, he tells her he's tried but she sees the truth in his eyes and it's that he hasn't put everything on the line this time because he thinks there's no use. He thinks Dean is dead.

Callie doesn't give a damn. She's going to find him, save him, and bring him home.


	7. Chapter 7

_**End**_

His brother's body is still falling when Dean hits his knees in the mud, a sound like the end of everything escaping his lips but he doesn't even hear it because the world has frozen solid.

But the rain. It just keeps falling from the sky. Sharp like knives. Bright like blood. Fathomless like tears. It doesn't care that Sam's head has gone heavy, that his eyelids have fluttered shut, long lashes beaded up with droplets but he can't go to sleep, not now, not…

The name tears from his throat like a wild animal unleashed into the night, seeking vengeance because it's not just sleep and Dean knows it. Deep beneath where some part of him is still able to process reality he knows it.

But he won't let it happen, even as it _is_ happening. He will do his job, the only thing he's ever been good at. He will take care of Sammy.

Death can't compete with a big brother on a mission.

* * *

The hounds descend on him and his flesh parts in clean lines that fill and flood and overflow, the life draining from his eyes faster even than the blood.

It seems to them, the brother and sister that remain once it's over, that the very ground beneath them should part like the gashes on his body, swallow them all so they're together even if they're in Hell because that's how it should be. Three minus one is not two; it's zero, it's nothing and worse than nothing. It can't sustain, it can't function. He is dead, he is in Hell, and they don't know how to go on existing this way.

So they don't.

They come apart at the seams. Like his flesh, shredded by those awful beasts. They fall to pieces and they cease to be anything resembling who they were.

When he comes back to them he's more shocked to see what they've become than they are to see him whole and breathing.

* * *

Sometimes she lies awake at night and thinks about the apocalypse they won't stop. And it doesn't have to be anything huge like Lilith or Yellow Eyes; it could be something as simple as a knife in the back, a miscalculation when dodging a bullet, overconfidence in a fight even though "That's the quickest way to get yourself killed," Dean would admonish. (Which is funny, she thinks, because he has made sort of an art of cockiness.)

Her brothers are heroes. They are the real deal. They fight evil, they save the world, they put themselves in harm's way to take others out of it. Still, she thinks on these dark sleepless nights when she can hear their soft snoring in the very same room and knows without a doubt that if she so much as sits up in bed at least one of them will wake too, poised and alert and ready to fight before they're even fully conscious because this is the life they lead. ("Always be prepared, it's not just for Boy Scouts," Dean would say—and not just about condoms.)

It will happen one day. It could be jumping into an actual portal to Hell or it could be a car crash. But something will take one of them—like they've been taken before—and this time there will be no coming back. Sam won't awaken with a sharp breath and sit up in bed after three days because demons don't deal with them anymore. Dean won't claw his way out of his own grave because the angels won't get involved. No soul bargaining or tricks or magic or double-crossing. It will be done, over, finished.

And then?

She thinks it might just be over for all of them, because one or two can't sustain without the other. They would kill her just for thinking it, but that doesn't stop the train of thought.

The day they fail to save the world, or each other, she knows she won't be far behind.


End file.
